Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Kathy Acker

But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.

I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.

One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

Traveling around I don't think people are that horrible, I think they just don't know.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.

And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.

I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

You know I've had work banned.

On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

You can do whatever you want with my work.

LESBIANS are women who prefer their own ways to male ways.LESBIANS prefer the convoluting halls of sensuality to direct goal-pursuing mores. LESBIANS have made a small world deep within and separated from the world.What has usually been called the world is the male world.

Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefer loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home... The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in.

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

But : We're still human. Human because we keep on battling against all these horrors, the horrors caused and not caused by us. We battle not in order to stay alive, that would be too materalistic, for we are body and spirit, but in order to love each other.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.

Perhaps if human desire is said out loud, the urban planes, the prisons, the architectural mirrors will take off, as airplanes do. The black planes will take off into the night air and the night winds, sliding past and behind each other, zooming, turning and turning in the redness of the winds, living, never to return.

There are times when the law jeopardizes those who obey it.

The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.

GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.

Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.

All memory can do is scream for touch.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it

The whole world is men's bloody fantasies.

It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you.

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs.

You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more and more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's text that create identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism.

There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.

Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.

One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.